The Internet allows access to a wide variety of web sites. Some sites experience heavy traffic and may use large server farms dedicated to servicing a large number of concurrent requests. Examples of such sites might include large on-line book stores, world-wide bidding services, large corporate sites, and so forth. However, lower-traffic (hereinafter also called “smaller”) sites also contribute to the wealth and depth of the internet. Those smaller sites may encounter less traffic and may not be actively processing requests all the time. Perhaps such smaller sites may even be inactive most of the time. Examples of such smaller sites include, for example, a family blog that has a very limited number of authors and viewers.
For smaller sites, it is often economically and technically infeasible or at least inconvenient for the site owner to set up a server to actually host the web site. Accordingly, shared hosting service companies have come into being. Smaller web site owner may now hire the hosting service to host the web site. The hosting service will typically have one or more servers that serve a large number of web sites. It is possible, if not likely, to host a large number of web sites on a single server. Given that the shared hosting service provides services to a large number of smaller web sites that are not active all the time, the shared hosting service can have a single server host more web sites than the server would be capable of if the web sites were always active.
For instance, suppose the hosted web sites were on average active less than ten percent of the time. Also, suppose that a given server is capable of hosting 200 active web sites at a time. The shared hosting service might choose to deploy 2000 total web sites on the server in the hopes that the active web sites always stay less than the ten percent amount, thereby allowing the server to effectively service 2000 web sites in an acceptable manner. The success of this approach is dependent on the usage pattern of the host web sites, which may not be predictable in some cases.
However, shared hosting services recognize that trends sometimes change. Accordingly, shared hosting services perform a sort of manual load balancing by periodically checking each of their servers to be verify that the servers are effectively meeting the demands of the ever changing active web sites. In the case where the server is meeting demand by a significant margin and safety factor where the server is meeting demand and still has additional unconsumed resources, the service might choose to deploy additional web sites on that server to effectively maximize the server resources. In the case where the server is not meeting demand, this means that the server is at least at risk of failing to adequately respond to web site requests. In such a case, the hosting service might remove some web sites off of the server, and redeploy them on another, perhaps new, server. As the total number of web sites and/or the average percentage of active web sites increase, the shared hosting service will add new servers. A shared hosting service may have hundreds or even thousands of such servers, each having deployed thereon a large number of web sites. Each of these servers may have a configuration file that is managed by the service.